Pri­vacy ad­voc­ates are quickly pulling their sup­port from a newly amended bill in­ten­ded to lim­it the gov­ern­ment’s mass col­lec­tion of Amer­ic­ans’ phone re­cords.

A new ver­sion of the USA Free­dom Act was re­leased Tues­day, the cul­min­a­tion of more than a week of in­tense back­door ne­go­ti­ations among House lead­er­ship, the White House, and the in­tel­li­gence com­munity.

The House will vote on the meas­ure on Thursday, a spokes­man for Ma­jor­ity Lead­er Eric Can­tor said. But back­ers of gov­ern­ment-sur­veil­lance re­form wasted no time con­demning the changes.

“House lead­ers should have al­lowed a vote on the com­prom­ise ver­sion of the USA Free­dom Act that was already agreed to, rather than un­der­min­ing their own mem­bers and cav­ing in to the in­tel­li­gence com­munity’s de­mands,” said Kev­in Bank­ston, the policy dir­ect­or of the New Amer­ica Found­a­tion’s Open Tech­no­logy In­sti­tute, in a state­ment. “We can­not in good con­science sup­port this weakened ver­sion of the USA Free­dom Act, where key re­forms — es­pe­cially those in­ten­ded to end bulk col­lec­tion and in­crease trans­par­ency — have been sub­stan­tially watered down.”

Har­ley Gei­ger, a seni­or coun­sel at the Cen­ter for Demo­cracy & Tech­no­logy, said his group was also with­draw­ing its sup­port for the bill due to its loose defin­i­tion of a “spe­cif­ic se­lec­tion term,” which provides a basis for how nar­rowly in­tel­li­gence agen­cies would be re­quired to define se­lec­ted tar­gets when con­duct­ing a search of phone re­cords.

The new lan­guage “might lim­it na­tion­wide sur­veil­lance, but does not clearly lim­it this au­thor­ity for area codes or cit­ies,” Gei­ger said. “It would provide for an un­ac­cept­able level of sur­veil­lance in a bill that is sup­posed to re­form broad gov­ern­ment sur­veil­lance.”

Oth­er back­ers of sur­veil­lance re­form took to Twit­ter to ex­press sim­il­ar frus­tra­tion. The flurry of with­draw­als “mir­ror law­makers’ grow­ing con­cerns” about the bill, a spokes­man for Rep. Zoe Lof­gren, a Cali­for­nia Demo­crat, said.

The com­prom­ise fur­ther moves the goal­posts on cer­tain pri­vacy and trans­par­ency meas­ures to­ward what na­tion­al se­cur­ity hawks wanted, even after they scored sev­er­al con­ces­sions earli­er this month when an amended bill passed out of the House Ju­di­ciary and In­tel­li­gence com­mit­tees.

The bill, au­thored by Rep. Jim Sensen­bren­ner, still would not al­low bulk, lim­it­less col­lec­tion of all phone metadata — the num­bers and time stamps of a call but not its con­tents — but its defin­i­tion of when gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials are al­lowed to search those re­cords has been widened from earli­er agreed-upon lan­guage, ad­voc­ates say. In ad­di­tion, a trans­par­ency pro­vi­sion that spe­cifies how much tech com­pan­ies can dis­close about the gov­ern­ment’s re­quests of user data falls short of what many had hoped.

The amended Free­dom Act, which was also filed by Sensen­bren­ner, is slated for con­sid­er­a­tion in the Rules Com­mit­tee on Tues­day af­ter­noon. Sources on and off Cap­it­ol Hill said they were skep­tic­al the vote would al­low an open-amend­ment de­bate.

"The Senate passed a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill on Tuesday night, handing a significant victory to President Trump and senators who lobbied to advance the legislation before the end of the year. Senators voted 87-12 on the legislation, which merges a House-passed prison reform bill aimed at reducing recidivism with a handful of changes to sentencing laws and mandatory minimum prison sentences." The House aims to vote on the measure when it reconvenes later this week.

Source:

"EKE OUT" MORE COOPERATION

Judge Delays Flynn Sentencing

10 hours ago

THE LATEST

Federal Judge Emmet Sullivan "agreed Tuesday to postpone Michael Flynn’s sentencing after a hearing to decide the punishment for President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser went awry." Sullivan gave Flynn a chance to reconsider his decision to plead guilty, adding that he could not "guarantee a sentence without prison time, even after the special counsel’s office recommended that Flynn not be incarcerated. After a brief recess, Sullivan and prosecutors agreed to delay sentencing so that Flynn could "eke out the last modicum of cooperation."